1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an organic compound, a quaternary data storage device containing the organic compound, and a method of preparing the organic compound and the quaternary data storage device.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
At the end of 2009, the movie Avatar with the 3D Imax technique won a wide reputation around the globe due to the unprecedented enjoyment it brought visually and acoustically. However, the film of this movie weighs up to 700 kilograms, indicating that the current memory materials and techniques are far behind the pace of the rapid development of the information society. Till now, almost all the efforts in the high density data storage field are focused on increasing the data storage density via diminishing the scale of the memory cells. When inorganic material suffered its bottleneck due to its intrinsic properties to further diminish the scale, researchers have turned their attention to polymeric and organic materials possessing good processability with the anticipation that the data storage density could be further enhanced by diminishing the scale of the memory units. The scale can only be diminished from the microscale to nanoscale with the storage density increase no more than 1000 times, which also cannot meet the requirements for super-high density data storage in the long run. The reason is that current optical, magnetic and electric memories based on polymeric and organic materials are generally conventional binary memory (“0” and “1”). To further enhance the data storage density, researchers successively achieved ternary storage (“0”, “1”, “2”) with inorganic nanowires and organic materials respectively, breaking through the conventional binary memory, dramatically increasing the storage density of unit area tens of thousands of times (i.e., for the same 40 storage units, the storage density for ternary memory is more than 10 million times higher than that for binary memory). See, e.g., H. Li, Q. Xu, N. Li, R. Sun, J. Ge, J. Lu, H. Gu, F. Yan, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2010, 132, 5542; and Y. W. Jung, S. H. Lee, A. T. Jennings, R. Agarwal, Nano Lett. 2008, 8, 2056. In this way, enormous storage capacity can be attained with less storage units, making the storage cells more compact. And the fabricating process for the device can be simplified, thus achieving a new generation of super-high density data storage devices with high capacity, small dimension, low power consumption and low cost.
The data storage density can be further enhanced with continuing increase in the quantity of electrically stable states. Accordingly, there exists a need for new data storage materials with increased quantity of electrically stable states and data storage density.